Table of Contents

The emergence of Iroquoian village societies in southern Ontario, Canada, was connected to the intensification of horticulture, residential sedentarization, and pronounced regional demographic growth. This paper critically evaluates longstanding archaeological debates about the nature and consequences of the early development of Northern Iroquoian village communities in southern Ontario. I argue that an adequate understanding of these developments depends on moving past debates over ethno-linguistic origins and degrees of sedentism, and toward a perspective that carefully traces people’s changing material engagements with their natural and built environments. This review suggests that Early Iroquoian villages were united by new kinds of generative entanglements with built space that can be understood as “place-making” practices. Early village place-making involved the architectural and ritual definition of enduring social groups—households and village communities—even as they maintained significant seasonal and logistic mobility across the landscape.

Smith (2011a) proposed a model of environmental engineering which includes six discrete categories of resource management believed to be universal within small-scale, pre-industrial societies. Through examination of the resource management practices of the Kayapó in the Amazon Basin and the Blackfoot on the Northwestern Plains, this paper will test the validity of Smith’s model. The evidence presented will show that, with slight variations due to differences in mobility, Smith’s model is largely appropriate. Additionally, although the management and use of “wild” or semi-domesticated resources is often seen as a step on the road to agriculture, resource management and the domestication of landscape can, in fact, be a specifically chosen subsistence strategy in and of itself. This type of resource management can also continue after agriculture has been adopted by a group, particularly if wild species continue to be an important part of a group’s subsistence regime.

Investigations on the Canadian Plains have been unsuccessful in differentiating between pre-contact projectile points recovered from One Gun phase sites—an intrusive group to the region—and points from the locally defined Cayley series, which are frequently used as diagnostic markers of the Old Women’s phase. This paper uses a variety of statistical methods to investigate similarities between points from the One Gun phase Cluny site, and points from the uppermost levels (Old Women’s phase) of the Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump site. Metrics were collected on digital images from direct 2-D point scans to promote consistency, accuracy, and replicability. While population level differences were found, individual specimens could not be identified to their respective phase. In this case, projectile points are not reliable variables for linking components with phases in the protohistoric period, which suggests that the point type may be best described as a horizon style.

A recent magnetometer survey from the Late Archaic Davidson Site (AhHk-54) demonstrates the potential of this technique in understanding hunter-gatherer occupations in the Great Lakes Region, and contributes to our understanding of temporal change in the spatial use of the site. Davidson was investigated to test the long held, but little substantiated notion that the Late Archaic represents a time of reduced settlement mobility. Hundreds of features, including storage pits, earth ovens, hearths and the remains of some of the oldest known houses in the Great Lakes region were identified using the magnetometer and indicate that the site is much larger and more complex than previously believed. Ground-truthing of these results through excavation and coring, combined with repeated field-walking of the site to map artifact distributions, allows us to document more fully the extent of intact deposits, the site setting at the time of the occupation and changes in site function and use from the Broad Point to Small Point (Terminal) Archaic. Our findings indicate that more widespread use of geophysical survey techniques on Canadian archaeological sites has the potential to contribute not only to a deeper understanding of the archaeological record, but also to the development of archaeogeophysics from its traditional role in site prospection to more problem-based, theoretically informed applications.

The Hopedale region in Labrador, Canada has a rich history of human activity. Some of the earliest archaeological research on Inuit of this region was conducted by American archaeologist Junius Bird in 1935; however, few researchers have returned to the region to expand on his work. This paper provides a summary of recent excavations conducted at an eighteenth century Inuit sod house settlement Bird identified on Anniowaktook Island (GgCi-02) just east of Hopedale. The region was considered a central trading area among Inuit. Excavations were expected to identify items indicative of this trade with the increasing prevalence of European traders along the coast. Instead, artifact assemblages at Anniowaktook reveal a smaller than expected collection of trade items, and a surprisingly high density of metal materials. The types and quantity of materials amassed suggest Anniowaktook Inuit were making different consumption choices to acquire materials for tool manufacture which were not traditionally part of the trade system.